It’s hard to believe another month has passed! I’ve spent my time working (ugh), playing with Darcy (adorable), feeling guilty about how little I’ve written (NaNoWriMo’s coming, so there’s hope), plugging away at my sister’s birthday party (it’s only a few months late!), and fretting about how I haven’t yet had a good Halloween costume idea (I have a reputation to uphold). All in all it’s been an okay month, but my reading has been erratic, with a couple of great reads, lots of middling reads, and one so terrible it is in contention for my worst book of the year. It was seriously so bad I couldn’t even bring myself to write a full review for it. The brief rant below is all the time and energy I was willing to give it.
Since more people read my August Wrap-Up than any previous ones, I’m going to repeat that format of starting with movies and TV I watched and then head into books.
Here’s what I watched…
Persuasion
Listen, I love Jane Austen. I’ve read all her published works—most of them multiple times—and most of the unpublished ones (including Love and Freindship, Lady Susan, and Sanditon). I’ve watched just about every adaptation there is (the best Pride and Prejudice is the one with Jennifer Ehle and Colin Firth; if you prefer the Keira Knightley one you can get out), so of course I had to watch the new—and widely panned—adaptation of Persuasion. I wasn’t all that concerned about hating it for a number of reasons. One, I was going into it with my eyes open. I knew to expect stupidity, a random bunny, weirdly modernized language, and general tonal dissonance. Two, Persuasion is my least favorite of Austen’s work. It’s fine, but it’s not an Emma or a Pride and Prejudice or a Northanger Abbey. Ruin one of those and we’ll have words. (Any Kiera Knighley fans left? Let’s have words: she plays Lizzie like Lydia for some reason and it’s horrendous). But Persuasion? Eh. I’m not going to get too upset even if it’s butchered.
If you watch this movie knowing it’s going to be terrible, it’s actually quite fun. Watch it as a bad rom-com, not as a straight adaptation of Jane Austen and you’ll enjoy yourself. Make a BINGO card and go to town. It’s a hilarious movie. Is it funny in the ways that the creators intended? Probably not, but it’s funny nonetheless. And Richard E. Grant is always a welcome addition to anything.
Scrubs
Sometimes you just gotta rewatch a comfort show. I finally have a streaming service with Scrubs on it again, so I’m doing a rewatch. It stands up pretty well. There are a few moments that didn’t age super well (it’s mostly Dr. Cox’s casual misogyny), but on the whole it did because a lot of the iffy stuff is treated as iffy even in-universe, which is not usually the case in an older show. I even love the Todd who, yes, is terrible, but terrible in a hilarious way. Scrubs does a great job of blending deeper storytelling with ridiculous gags, and it packs a lot of laughs in a short period. Dr. Kelso in particular cracks me up every scene he’s in (what has two thumbs and doesn’t give a crap?). I’ll also never get over the fact that Scrubs is apparently more medically accurate than medical dramas like Grey’s Anatomy that take themselves pretty seriously.
House of the Dragon
I nearly skipped House of the Dragon because I was so massively disappointed in that trainwreck of an ending Game of Thrones slapped together (Jaime’s ending was a travesty, Dany’s—while a fitting end for her character—was too rushed to feel fully satisfying, and personally I think Arya was the wrong person to kill the Night King). I got pulled in relatively quickly, though, because I kept seeing great reviews and because I’m a big fan of Matt Smith. He’s my favorite Doctor, he was great in The Crown, and he was the best part of the otherwise questionable Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Me eventually watching House of the Dragon was probably a foregone conclusion, though. I love Game of Thrones (the books and the show, with the last season excepted), I’m obsessed with fantasy and dragons, I’m a Matt Smith fan, and I’m a fandom bandwagonner. If everyone is talking about something, I want to have seen/read enough of it to be in on the conversation.
I’m glad I jumped in, because the show is really good. It has a smaller scope than Game of Thrones, with the main action being limited largely to the Targaryen family and those in their immediate circle, which is interesting because the original was so sprawling. The accelerated timeline also really different, and it is the one thing that I’m not sure about with the show. I loved how Game of Thrones was as much a character study as an epic fantasy. We spent a lot of time with a lot of characters, and the slow growth they made over the course of several books/seasons was incredible (Jaime, Sansa, and Theon are particularly great in this respect). We don’t get the same slow development in this new show, because there are significant time jumps between every episode. We see a big decision and then pick up with the long-term repercussions a week later. For the most part it has worked fine. Like, Daemon is one of the most interesting characters—and Matt Smith as Daemon has a magnetic presence; he somehow stole episodes he barely speaks in—and it makes sense to skip over the long periods when he’s missing because the show probably wouldn’t be as interesting or compelling if there were long stretches without him around to kick up trouble. When the jumps are relatively small—just a few weeks or months, enough for the characters to have made a long journey but not long enough for them to have fundamentally changed as people—they are very effective. In Game of Thrones, it was all right to lose someone for several months as they made the trek to the wall or whatever, because there was always someone else with a more active storyline. That’s not true here because of the smaller cast and the more limited geography—most of our main characters are together at any given point, and the rest are likely waiting for them to get into position—so it makes total sense to skip over the periods with fewer moving parts. This is an action-packed show, and no one is going to complain if it fast-forwards to the action.
Unfortunately, I’m not as sold on the show as of the most recent episode (1×06 The Princess and the Queen). The previous episodes are all interesting and dramatic, with the conflicts feeling both very personal and very large-scale. Then we had a ten-year jump that skipped over a lot of development I would have liked to see (the immediate aftermath of Alicent’s stand, the repercussions or lack thereof of Criston’s murder of Joffrey, Daemon and Laena’s courtship, and to Viserys’ mid-wedding collapse are glossed over) and right into some I care far less about. When we pick up, Criston is just chilling with Alicent, having apparently not been punished for ruining the royal wedding. Daemon is largely settled down. Rhaenyra is having an affair with Ser Harwin Strong, a character I honestly wouldn’t have known existed if it weren’t for all those thirsty tweets, and having his children even though 1) abortion tea is clearly very readily available for a Targaryen princess 2) Rhaenyra never wanted kids and already has an heir and therefore has fulfilled her duty vis-à-vis childbearing 3) both Rhaenyra and Laenor have white hair, which is probably a recessive trait, and her children are therefore obviously not her husband’s, which threatens her succession.
The sassy spitfire Rhaenyra we left at the end of episode five is not the grave matriarch we meet in episode six, and while she of course could have developed into that person in a decade, we didn’t see any of the growth and it therefore feels abrupt and unearned. It doesn’t help that the new actor looks absolutely nothing like the old one. I’m in the minority, apparently, but I honestly don’t think they could have found actors who look less like the originals. I spent the whole episode going “who’s that?” whenever Alicent 2.0 entered a scene because she looks NOTHING like the original. Rhaenyra could at least fall back on that distinctive hair, but if she didn’t have that I’m not sure I’d have realized who she was supposed to be.
Also, for me personally, the best way to put me off is to start an episode with childbirth. That was our first introduction to Rhaenyra 2.0 and just… ugh. At least Aemma and Laena (whom I did really like) got to work up to their delivery scenes. Plus, I really care about the core of characters we already have, but I’m not really into the idea of having to care about all their kids. It feels like we’ve fast-forwarded through a lot of story to get to these kids, and so far they haven’t earned it. I’m simply far less interested in parenthood and children than dragon battles and royal pettiness, and dropping eight new characters on us seems like a bit much.
The only real saving grace of this episode is Larys. Again, I know. Minority. He’s an evil creep, but at least he’s an interesting evil creep. I was more into his like ten minutes of screentime than the whole rest of the episode. Larys’ plotting felt like Game of Thrones. Alicent and Rhaenyra’s baby standoff felt like Maury: Westeros Edition.
Hopefully I’ll settle into the new cast and get back to the level of enthusiasm I had for the first five episodes, but right now I’m a little lukewarm. Too bad for House of the Dragon that I didn’t write this mini-review before episode six aired.
Here’s what I read…
A Complicated Love Story Set in Space by Shaun David Hutchinson
At this point I’ve read most of Shaun David Hutchinson’s books, and I’ve liked all of them so far to varying degrees. A Complicated Love Story Set in Space feels different than the others. Like all of Hutchinson’s work, it is very high concept. There are aliens. The main characters are queer. So it’s not, like, a huge departure. I think the main difference is the ending. With his previous books, I’ve felt slightly like the ideas are too big for any sort of real resolution, so they peter out more with a whisper than a bang. That’s definitely not true here. Don’t get me wrong. The plot is still absolutely bonkers and it still has some interesting things to say about parts of our society (I can’t say what parts, because that’d be a spoiler). On the whole, though, it builds towards answers instead of questions, which is great since that was one issue I had with The Apocalypse of Elena Mendoza and At the Edge of the Universe. It took me a little bit to get into this book, largely because a lot of the storylines that interested me the most—Jenny’s detective-work, the weirdness of the Qriosity—decidedly play second fiddle to the titular complicated love story set in space. In short, though, A Complicated Love Story Set in Space is an entertaining read with a slightly slow start but an appropriately insane ending that results in a book that is a lot of fun and unlike anything I’ve read.
Full review here
Dark and Shallow Lies by Ginny Myers Sain
I read this book very quickly, not necessarily by choice—it’s the BN monthly pick for YA and I’m a BN bookseller whose specialty is in YA—but it was an easy book to read that way. The description, which focuses on the many psychics living in a small town of secrets, indicates that Dark and Shallow Lies is all about the fantasy, but I would argue that it reads more like a thriller. That’s not to say that there aren’t fantasy elements. There are, but they’re set dressing. Yes, the various magical gifts the characters possess inform their actions and in many cases their personalities, but at its heart this is a novel about a girl who goes missing in a town with a bloody history. The interweaving of the current disappearances with the decade-old murders that everyone knows about but doesn’t really talk about is done really well, and it gives Dark and Shallow Lies a fast-moving, punchy pace. This makes for a really exciting read, because the heroine Grey (and, by extension, the reader with her) learns something that seemingly changes everything every couple of chapters. There are enough twists to keep you guessing the whole time, but there are enough clues that the mystery is absolutely guessable well before the ending (I guessed one of the biggest surprises very early on, and I had my eye on the most ultimately suspicious players while Grey was still chasing red herrings). My only real complaint is that at the very end the novel falls into what I call the double-twist trap: it gives us what appears to be one big, final twist that is absolutely brilliant and absolutely everything that I wanted… only to squeeze one last one in that is definitely exciting in the moment but ultimately disappointing because, while it is more surprising, it is less emotionally and thematically resonant.
Full review here
Mercury Pictures Presents by Anthony Marra
This was a painful one for me. I would have DNF’d this if I hadn’t read it for book club. I literally fell asleep reading it multiple times, and when I’d finally finished it I was so relieved that I gave myself the rare permission to not write a full review. I usually only do that for classic books about which I don’t feel a typical review (as opposed to an analysis) is worth writing.
Writing should serve the story it is telling, and the writing here is excruciating. The long, overwrought, self-indulgent writing sucks any momentum or emotion Mercury Pictures Presents might otherwise have scrounged up, and it’s what put me to sleep. The first 200 pages are unceasing. Once I made it past that, things got a little better (maybe Anthony Marra had even put himself off at that point), but to make it to the point of the novel at which it becomes readable I had to make it through two hundred pages of this:
“Gesture and insinuation comprised the Italian American vernacular, from mamma to Mafia, and coming from the diaspora where desires and death threats went articulately unspoken, Maria had a knack for smuggling subtext past the border guards of decorum at the Production Code Administration.”
“The priest was a known hypochondriac, and Mimi liked watching him squirm the next day, following Holy Communion, when he had to slurp down the sacramental backwash in full knowledge of the sullied places his parishioners’ lips had probed.”
“He ladles a fedora full of fog onto his head and walks to the car.”
Overly flowery writing isn’t my taste, but that doesn’t mean it is bad… except when there is no variation. There was no respite from that style. I didn’t pick and choose sentences for my above example. I just opened the book and picked a particularly egregious example from whatever page I landed on. If you’re going to have a lot of really long, excruciatingly descriptive passages you have to mix it up with a few shorter sentences with action or emotion or character building or, really, anything else. And before you ask, no, describing someone’s toupees a hundred times does not constitute interesting character work. I got the idea the first time. The subsequent descriptions added nothing.
The writing is so distracting that I barely have any response to the actual content of the book. It should have been really interesting in that it follows Italian- and Chinese-Americans in Hollywood during WWII, but that darn writing style put a blockade up between me and the story and I could not get invested in anything but hoping for it to end.
Into the Woods by Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine; adapted and illustrated by Hudson Talbott
I LOVE musicals, and Into the Woods is one of my favorites. I grew up on the filmed version with Bernadette Peters and Chip Zien and I saw the movie version with Meryl Streep when it was in theatres. It is a beautiful musical with incredible lyrics, some of which are touchingly deep and others that are hilarious. Many are both are both powerful and amusing. “Agony” is one of my favorite musical songs—it’s so darkly funny—and there are few lines that have made me chuckle more than “life is often so unpleasant; you must know that as a peasant” from “Any Moment/Moments in the Woods.”
I had no idea there was a book version of Into the Woods until my mom inherited it, and I was immediately taken by how gorgeous it is. I didn’t particularly expect much from the content. Novelizations don’t always feel necessary, strictly speaking, but the selling point of Into the Woods is not the words but the illustrations. They’re vivid and spectacular, evoking the same emotions as what you get from the musical but without mimicking the aesthetic of the versions everyone is familiar with. Honestly, you don’t have to read this book… but I’d recommend flipping through it to anyone.
That’s not to say that the content is bad. It reads like an attempted facsimile of the musical, but with some dialogue tags added in for good measure. Many of the lyrics are written out in their entirety, but others—notably Cinderella’s whole song “On the Steps of the Palace”—are reduced to a paragraph or two of exposition. The ones that are kept intact only serve to demonstrate how inherently melodic these lyrics are. I dare you to read them without singing. Even if you don’t know the songs, you’d probably fall quickly into the right rhythm, because they flow so well.
This adaptation seems to skate past the darker parts of the musical, with the deaths, affairs, and moral bleakness of the second half present but less dwelt on than they are in the show. The narrator is also not present as a character, so of course the other characters cannot sacrifice him and the book is resultantly significantly less meta than its source material. Onstage, Into the Woods is a reflection on and deconstruction of fairy tales. On the page it is a fairy tale. A dark one perhaps, but a fairy tale nonetheless.
In short, though, I love Into the Woods the musical and these illustrations by Hudson Talbott are stunning.
I Kissed Shara Wheeler by Casey McQuiston
It is no surprise that I loved this one. I liked Red, White, and Royal Blue and I LOVED One Last Stop. In general I’m not a romance person, but YA is my jam and I was so excited when Casey McQuiston announced she’d written her YA debut. It has all her trademarks: a queer enemies-to-lovers love story, a delightfully rainbow cast of supporting characters, a quick pace, and lots of letters. If you liked McQuiston’s other work, you’ll like this one (unless you’re one of those people who will squeal about gay boys but don’t want to read about queer girls, in which case get out). It’s cute, it’s quick, and underneath the candy-coated exterior there’s a lot of substance: the uncomfortable reality of being queer in a conservative/religious community, the pressure of conforming to expectations (and gender!), the blinders that keep us struggling in silence while others struggle invisibly beside us, and the challenge of seeing people for who they are rather than who we want them to be. I really enjoyed this one, and would wholeheartedly recommend it to any YA readers, but particularly those who liked Paper Towns or Becky Albertalli.
Full review here
Hell Followed With Us by Andrew Joseph White
This is a graphic horror novel with lots of religious trauma, body horror, and vomiting. It was very tough to read. Intentionally so, but still. I didn’t have a particularly good time reading it; it’s not fun to read about people vomiting organs and ripping teeth out of their skulls with pliers. It’s a lot, which is something that I definitely could have figured out from the author’s introduction, which includes an extensive and much-needed trigger warning. Of course, it also included the promise of a story that would “show queer kids that they can walk through hell and come out alive. Maybe not in one piece, maybe forever changed, but alive and worthy of love all the same.” That’s definitely what this is: a book written from a place of rage that is somehow both deeply upsetting and somewhat cathartic.
This is a good book, but I’m very glad to have finished it. It was emotionally exhausting and I’m very ready to move onto something significantly lighter. I don’t know if I would recommend this except in narrow circumstances. There’s a lot that is upsetting, traumatic, and triggering in this book, and it’s very hard to hand that sort of thing to someone you don’t know well. All this to say, this is a good one but read it with care because it’s difficult.
Full review here
Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe
Personally, I think Gender Queer is extraordinary. I’d been interested it ever since the first time I saw it, even before I realized it was on the top of the ALA banned list from 2021. That Stonewall Honor is always a major selling point for me. Before reading it in full, I had idly picked Gender Queer up a few times, opened it to a random page, and read a few panels. Every single time I’d think wow, relatable. Kobabe has a gift for distilling very large, very complex emotions into a few simple images that are easy to understand and empathize with. Gender Queer is more a collection of connected vignettes than a single narrative, which makes it very conducive to that sort of pick-up-and-put-down style of reading. That being said, when I actually sat down to read it, I did so in a single sitting. It is a quick read that nevertheless packs a lot of punch. It’s easy to read and is both enjoyable and educational. I’d highly recommend it to anyone genderqueer or trans because they’ll likely see themselves in it, to anyone questioning their gender or sexuality because it is a very clarifying and honest account, and to anyone cis who simply wants to understand an experience they’ll never feel firsthand.
Full review here
We Used to be Friends by Amy Spalding
I wish I’d liked this one more. I loved the premise, but thought that the uneven storytelling let it down. I more or less enjoyed it, but I don’t think I was supposed to be able to take a side in the central fractured friendship so easily and James was, at the end of the day, not a character I was able to root for. When the whole book is about a relationship and one of the people in that relationship is terrible, it takes the project as a whole down. Since the writing is good and the other lead character Kat was still an enjoyable character with a compelling storyline, I’m not going to give up on Amy Spalding… but The Summer of Jordi Perez is still hands-down the one to read. That being said, if anyone knows another book with a similar premise to We Used to Be Friends, please let me know because I’d love to read it.
Full review here
What do you think of the new House of the Dragon cast? What Banned Books did you read this month? Are you strong enough to DNF books that you’re hating or do you power through to the end?
A Blog of Books and Musicals 